


Photo Albums

by squirenonny



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: AU, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-04-04
Packaged: 2018-03-30 11:21:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3934936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Crossover/Earth AU. Spook and Renarin meet in a photography class and tell their story in photo albums.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Photo Albums

**The first pages are artistic shots. Posed and impersonal but precious for what they represent.**

Spook and Renarin meet though the photography class they both take at the community center. It’s portrait week, and they’re assigned to each other. They’ve never spoken, and today is not the day they start.

For Spook, photography is second nature. Each shot is at once a work of art and an homage to the subject. Renarin remembers feeling guilty that Spook was stuck with such a stiff model, but in the photos he looks only poised. Confident. It’s not him, but there is affection in the lighting and the composition, and he tells Spook, years after the fact, that he could have made a career out of this.

Renarin captures a world in a few carefully planned photographs. When Spook looks back at them, he doesn’t see himself. He sees Renarin’s soul with Spook as mere canvas.

They don’t speak while photographing one another, except short, crisp directions on where to stand and where to look. It’s another week, until the class is told to show the results of their photo shoots to their partner, that they learn each others’ names.

**Next comes snapshots, candid and silly. They look like less than what came before, but each one contains a memory.**

Renarin laughing, a slice of pizza halfway into his mouth, on their first (unofficial) date night. It was a comedy they rented, and they both ignored the movie, too caught up in one another to care.

(There were other nights, and other photos, when they put in a horror flick. Renarin claimed to be afraid of them but in every snapshot his eyebrows are arched with irritation, his hands flying in cutting critique of the film’s internal logic. And Spook, who once boasted that he’d yet to see a monster, alien, or serial killer that could scare him, is always curled in on himself, hiding under blankets, or just a tuft of out-of-focus hair in the corner of the picture as he dives for the relative safety of Renarin’s shoulder.)

Spook is a blur in every snapshot from this era. He’s always pulling Renarin along to new adventures, always climbing trees and fences and statues and falling down again before Renarin can get the shot Spook so desperately wants. He’s larger than life and faster than film and years later it sends Renarin into fits of laughter because he doesn’t know how he ever kept up with that kind of energy.

(Renarin is out of focus, too, in many of these shots, but usually that’s because he caught Spook lifting the camera in time to dive for cover.)

And there are pictures–far too many–of Spook taking pictures. Spook collects landscapes like Renarin collects portraits, and sometimes Renarin gets bored waiting for the eightieth shot– _last one, I swear_ –of sunset over the water.

(On the opposite page, always, are the images Spook took, while Renarin was watching him, and either one of them can match them up without even having to think.)

**For a while they are both squished into every frame, limbs intertwined, faces off-center.**

It’s like they’re making up for lost time, for the dates spent respectably in separate chairs, for goodnight kisses quick and clean. Spook still remembers the night he learned that Renarin likes to cuddle, likes to listen to Spook’s heart beating in his chest. He still remembers the first time he ran his fingers through Renarin’s hair and woke up intertwined on the couch, credits rolling for a film neither of them watched.

They have friends, of course, who could take the photos for them, but Spook and Renarin both agree that the hilarity of trying to frame a selfie makes for better results in the long-run. They keep the whole series, every time. From mismatched foreheads and chins, to the tears brought on by too much laughter and too precarious a perch, to the final, glowing portrait that only took twenty minutes to capture.

**Here begin the stolen moments.**

Renarin’s sleeping face, pillowed on Spook’s lap. He’s too precious to disturb and too beautiful to let the moment pass without saving it for tomorrow.

Spook, turned away from the camera, the wind in his hair and exuberance in every line of his body as he leads them up the trail to the lookout point.

Shots from behind, from the side, from the days when they stop noticing the presence of another as _an other_ and accept the cameras like old pets: forgotten one moment, starving for attentionthe next. They are both well used to the camera’s eye and no longer bother to pose or to hide.

The film holds every moment of their life, from high to low. When they smile, the camera makes them laugh. When they lean into each other, the camera sews them together. When they cry, the camera reminds them of brighter days, and they pull out the albums–too many now to count, because how do you edit your own love story for the sake of shelf space?

They make it a rule, unspoken but unbreakable, to never finish an album without starting the next, because this is one story they don’t want to finish.


End file.
